Re: Frech keyboard with xfree
On Tue, 26 Oct 2004 18:02:18 +1000, "Benjamin Herrenschmidt" said:
> On Tue, 2004-10-26 at 10:12 +0200, Sven Luther wrote:
>
> > I never fuly understood why you needed to rebuild the xkb module though, nor
> > do i really know what should be the right way for it to work in the first
> > place, never having used a pmac before.
>
> I didn't rebuild anything ...
>
> One thing I have in my hacked keymap is defining Alt as Mode_switch to
> get the special combos using Alt, like Alt-shift-L for | or Alt-N for ~
> (dead key) etc...
>
> I think it should be possible to tell xkb to just do those combos with
> Alt- without actually defining Alt as Mode_switch or whatever else...
Well it could be, but it would be very strange, I think. Both
Mode_switch and ISO_Level3_Shift are like the regular Shift keys. If you
wanted an Altkey and F to be the "alt modifier" + F to open the File
menu, but you want an Altkey and N to be Mode_switch + N and generate a
deadtilde symbol, it would probably be possible, but you would have to
make substantial changes to the types/ files that would depend heavily
on the symbols files.
I think there are two problems here. One is that the traditional
xlib/xmodmap keymaps and the XKB maps use groups and levels a little bit
differently (if you are using xmodmap to change third- or fourth-level
symbols, you're probably confusing XKB). The other is the historical
difference between the Alt_L/Alt_R and Meta_L/Meta_R symbols. Some
people expect the PC's Altkeys to generate Alt_L/_R and others expect
Meta_L/_R.
And add to this that Mac OS users expect the Altkeys to behave like
Mode_switch or ISO_Level3_Shift to get third symbols, and Windows users
expect things like Altkey+Tabkey to cycle through windows and it's a
total mess.
> Looking at the way the Darwin driver works, it just fills the X keymap
> tables internally with proper translations based on the sets of
> modifiers, whatever those modifiers are.
>
> It's just a matter of understanding XKB syntax, which is beyond my
> abilities :)
The XKB syntax isn't that bad, but there are a lot of applications
(including all GTK+ apps, I think) that mix XKB usage and xlib/xmodmap.
There is an XKB keymap project
(http://freedesktop.org/Software/XKeyboardConfig) with freedesktop.org
that's trying to make sense of this, but different users have very
different expectations, so it's hard.
Frank
--
Frank Murphy
murphyf@f-m.fm
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